Swindon In 50 Buildings

Explore the rich history of Swindon in this guided tour through its most fascinating historic and modern buildings.

Secret Swindon explores the lesser-known history of the Wiltshire town of Swindon through a fascinating selection of stories, unusual facts and attractive photographs.

This fascinating selection of photographs traces some of the many ways in which Swindon Old Town has changed and developed over the last century.

Explores the rich and fascinating history of Worcester through an examination of some of its greatest architectural treasures.

Explores the rich and fascinating history of Reading through an examination of some of its greatest architectural treasures.

Explores the rich and fascinating history of Cheltenham through an examination of some of its greatest architectural treasures.

The permanent building societies of England grew from humble beginnings as a multitude of small and localized institutions in the nineteenth century to become the dominant players in the house mortgage market by the inter-war period. Throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the movement cultivated an image of being a champion of home ownership for the working classes, but housing historians have questioned whether building societies really lived up to this claim. This study fills a major gap in the historiography of the movement by investigating the class profile of building society members, and how the design of different building societies affected their accessibility, efficiency, and risk-taking practices between 1880 and 1939. These themes are explored using case studies of several building societies from this period and drawing upon extensive archival records. The Building Society Promise shows that building societies did lend to working-class households before the First and Second World Wars, with some societies showing a greater commitment to working-class home ownership than others. What ultimately affected the outreach of individual societies was the quality of information they possessed, which in turn was largely determined by the types of agency networks they used to find and select borrowers. The phenomenal growth of some of these institutions in the inter-war period, however, and the ensuing competition which emerged between them, brought about profound changes in their firm structure which impaired their ability to reach out to lower-income households as efficiently as before. The findings of this research are relevant to both past and present debates about the optimal design of financial institutions in overcoming social exclusion in credit markets, and the deleterious effects that firm growth, market competition, and managerial self-interest can have on their performance and stability.

Grainger Town is as much an idea as it is a place. It is an important phenomenon, both historically and in today's debate about conservation in our cities and towns. Richard Grainger, a native of Newcastle and a builder and speculator unparalleled in the region, in the middle decades of the 19th century co-ordinated a radical re-planning that turned the town of his birth from an already handsome regional capital to one which excited the admiration of visitors from far and wide. Grainger's particular achievement was to create a new commercial and residential heart within a historic town, a heart with consistent architectural quality starkly different from the piecemeal and eclectic character of most northern industrial cities. This book describes the evolution of the area and explains how recent planning initiatives have celebrated and exploited a unique urban landscape and injected new life into it.